at the intersection of business, parenthood, and music

It’s already breaking 100 degrees in Texas. Summer is here…well officially on June 21. My kids will finish school this week. Then, hopefully, they will go on a couple of trips and attend a bunch of summer camps including a Spanish immersion one held by their school and have a lot of outdoor fun at Doublecreek Camp. They have been given things to work on during the summer and, of course, they are complaining that it’s not fair they have a tiny bit of summer “homework.” Little do they know that I would be fine with year round school! If only they could grasp now how “not fair” life usually is and how “more than fair” their short lives have been when compared to the majority of kids around the world, it would save them much disillusionment later.

This summer is going to be an interesting one for many reasons that I’ll post about soon. Lots of changes, mostly good. But with changes in situation and temperatures, there is always an adjustment period.

Here in extremely hot Austin, Texas pretty much all kids go back to school next week. I’m a founding parent of the Magellan International School (MIS), where my kids go, and they are excited to see all of their friends. The school has more than tripled in size since starting 2 years ago. They are even opening a new location to accommodate the growth! It really is amazing what the team has accomplished in such a short time.

My kids have been going to summer camp at the Y for most of the summer except for 3 weeks when they went to MIS summer camp and a couple of weeks of vacation with family. I’m glad they go to different summer camps and meet different types of people with various backgrounds. They learned a bunch of new hand games (e.g., older kid versions of patty cake). According to my daughter, mostly the girls play those games at the camp. It’s so funny for me to see my kids (boy and a girl) playing those games together at the house or reaching across the table at a restaurant. It brings back memories of when I used to know those games but now I can’t remember even one of those rhymes because the ones they do are completely different than the ones I knew. The one they were doing today had something to do with grandma losing her hair and the words “And that’s the way I like it. Uh huh. Uh huh.” But it keeps them preoccupied and laughing so that works for me.

I often wonder how they will look back on this time in their life and how what I do or don’t do will positively or negatively effect them. I think as parents if we thought about that too deeply, we’d freak out. I think of how my parents played a big role in my life whether they were paying attention or not, but at the same time my friends seemed to play an even bigger role at the time. Right now, I can’t remember many of the kids I played with when I was their ages. The few I do remember, I have no idea where they are or what they are doing but I know they had an effect on me at the time.

So now they go start another school year, see old friends and make new ones. I wonder if when they are my age they will still be friends or at least know how to get in touch with the friends they are making in school right now. Who knows! Our kids were born knowing about facebook so maybe they will be.